This document provides information on several artists who incorporate 3D modeling and animation into their art practice. It discusses artists such as Alex McLeod who uses 3D software to produce large-scale digital prints, Claudia Hart who makes 3D animated media installations and projections, and Moreshin Allahyari who uses 3D scanning and printing to reconstruct ancient artifacts destroyed by ISIS. The document also briefly profiles the work of Brenna Murphy, Katie Torn, Sabrina Ratte, Snow Yunxue Fu, and Birch Cooper who integrate 3D techniques into a variety of media.

1. Datt 2500
Introduction to 3D
modelling
Week 04

2. Art and 3D modelling
For the last couple of weeks the lectures have
focused on the fundamentals of 3D modelling and
its applications in a variety of industries.
Let’s take a break from the technical component of
the course and see examples of how Artists are
integrating 3D modelling and Animation into their art
practice and discuss how may use the skills we
developed in the first part of the course in future
work.

3. Alex Mcleod
https://www.alxclub.com
Toronto based artist
artist concerned with simulation and the transition of matter
Uses 3D software to produce 2D image and animation
Currently working on the world’s largest digital print (1.4km)
“I find myself in situations often where I am pushing things to the limit,”
says McLeod. He sees big public commissions like this one as
opportunities to problem-solve on a large and challenging scale: “I love
problem-solving and hate saying no.”

4. “I’ve been abstractedly representing different kinds of structures, or structural
plants and trees, and building them in certain ways so they give evidence to their
creation.”

5. Claudia Hart
http://bmruernpnhay.com
New York/Chicago based
Uses 3D animation to make media installations and projections
“emerged as part of that generation of 90s intermedia artists in the “identity art” niche, but now
updated through the scrim of technology. Her work is about issues of the body, perception,
nature collapsing into technology and then back again. Everything is fluid in it including gender.
She considers it Cyborg-ish, creating liminal spaces, and is in love with the interface between
real and unreal because it is space of contemplation and transformation.”
“Hart produces real things, not just mediated ones, meaning “mediated objects” (digitally
enabled sculptures, drawings, paintings, wallpaper, conceptual crafts), and projections on
painted walls, and ultimately on human bodies wearing sculptural screens of some sort.”

6. “My work adapts the forms and software normally used to create 3d shooter
games. It transposes discussions about digital technology and a critique of
the media through a feminist lens. In the context of ideas about a
technology that has replaced nature by threatening to eclipse and
permanently alter it, I argue that contemporary ideas about technology are
not a rupture but a reflection of very conventional ways of thinking.”

7. Brenna Murphy
http://bmruernpnhay.com
New York based artist and musician
engages with analog, virtual, post-digital methods of creation (VR, games,
3D print, 2D image and animation, etc.)
“Murphy uses computer programs to craft digital forms inspired by her
observations of the physical world. Made using a variety of programs
such as Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Blender, her complex, abstract
forms find synthesis between different digital disciplines. Murphy
combines her digital prints with found objects, collages, videos, and even
performance work in gallery spaces, seeking to cultivate relationships
between these forms and bring digital work into the realm of the
physical.”

8. “I add and carve until the arrangement is balanced in a way that creates a
perfectly cohesive, vibrating ecosystem,” she says of her process.”

9. Katie Torn
https://katietorn.com/index.html
New York based
integrates animation, 3D computer graphics, and video to model virtually simulated
scenes out of the detritus of internet and consumer culture.
“Torn’s hybrids offer a vision of new forms and substances that fuse organic and synthetic
materials. Female cyborgs are presented as Frankenstein-like monoliths; the surface of
their bodies smooth like plastic dolls or skin treated by reconstructive surgery. Elements
comingle in an uncomfortable conflation of innocence and adulteration—playful, childhood
toys rendered in soft pastels reside in toxic, apocalyptic environments. Operating in close
relation to the “natural” world, biomorphic forms excrete and ingest brightly colored liquid
into and from their surrounds, suggesting a life-force akin to oil or blood.”

10. Collecting elements available online, Torn’s digital assemblages carry traces
of web browsing histories. Referencing the Modernist traditions of Cubism
and Futurism in her avatars and abstractions, fantasy worlds and sci-fi
simulations are conflated with 20th century investigations into pictorial
space.

11. Sabrina Ratte
http://sabrinaratte.com
based in Montreal and Paris
Her interest in early video art led her to work with analog technologies
such as video synthesizers and video feedback. Later on, she integrated
3D animation to her process, which allowed for more complexe imageries
while creating a timeless aesthetic.
From utopian architecture to painterly textures, she investigates the fine
line between the virtual and the physical realm.
Her work includes single-channel videos, installations, sculptures, live
performances and prints.

13. Snow Yunxue Fu
https://snowyunxuefu.com/home.html
Chinese born Chicago based
“Snow Yunxue Fu’s artwork approaches the subject of the Sublime using
topographical computer rendered animation installations. She examines
and interprets the world around her through digital reality, where she draws
a parallel to the realms of the physical, the virtual, the metaphysical, and
multi-dimensionality.”
She exams and interprets the world around her through digital space and
virtual reality, where she draws a parallel to the realms of multi-
dimensionality, the physical, the virtual, and the metaphysical.

14. “Karst is multi-level virtual reality visual and sound experience / artwork that creates liminal spaces in between the representational and the
theatrical, the limited and the multi-dimensional, and the abstract and the real for people to visit and experience. The multiple scenes in
Karst reference a variety of places in our reality that is being limited to be visited because of various reasons, revealing human’s relationship
to the larger world.”

15. Moreshin Allahyari
http://www.morehshin.com
Iranian born, now based in America
Uses 3D scanning and printing processes
“Her work deals with the political, social, and cultural contradictions we
face every day. She thinks about technology as a philosophical toolset to
reflect on objects and as a poetic means to document our personal and
collective lives struggles in the 21st century.”
“Allahyari is currently developing a new body of work on Digital
Colonialism and ‘re-Figuring’ as a Feminism and de-colonialism practice,
using 3D scanners and 3D printers as her tools of investigation.”

16. Material Speculation: ISIS, 3D-printed sculptural reconstructions of
ancient artifacts destroyed by ISIS

17. “Material Speculation: ISIS” is a 3D modeling and 3D printing project
focused on the reconstruction of 12 selected (original) artifacts
(statues from the Roman period city of Hatra and Assyrian artifacts
from Nineveh) that were destroyed by ISIS in 2015. “Material
Speculation: ISIS” creates a practical and political possibility for
artifact archival, while also proposing 3D printing technology as a tool
both for resistance and documentation. It intends to use 3D printing as
a process for repairing history and memory.
Material Speculation: ISIS, goes beyond metaphoric gestures and
digital and material forms of the artifacts by including a flash drive and
a memory card inside the body of each 3D printed object. Like time
capsules, each object is sealed and kept for future civilizations. The
information in these flash drives includes images, maps, pdf files, and
videos gathered in the last months on the artifacts and sites that were
destroyed. These materials were sourced by an intense research
process involving contacting different archeologists, historians, and
museum staff (from Mosul Museum to archeologists and historians in
Iraq and Iran).

18. Birch Cooper
http://birchcooper.net
Birch Cooper’s upfor.digital exhibition Convolution Weave Structures
superimposed complex virtual sculptures onto documentary images of
Upfor’s physical gallery space, challenging the boundary between on-line and
off-line artistic production and exhibition.
Cooper describes the virtual sculptures as related to his electronic music
practice, referring to them as “aleatoric in a broad sense... not based strictly
on chance operations, but also on procedure and intuition.” In a playful
provocation of the market’s awkward embrace of media art, all virtual
sculptures are offered for sale.
The “objects” are sold as .obj (3D geometric models) files, with prices set
according to file sizes–which in turn reflect the complexity of the virtual
model and edition size.

19. Birch is inspired by post-human civilizations in the writing of hard science fiction author, Greg
Egan. He says, “The totally virtual life experience and environments of the characters provides an
imagined context for virtual sculpture that I find compelling. Maybe someday my work will be
experienced first hand by fully digital post-humans.”